Eustace II, (d. 1093), count of Boulogne, was the husband of
Goda, daughter of the English king Æthelred the Unready, and
aunt of Edward the Confessor. He was the son of Eustace I.

Eustace paid a visit to England in 1051, and was honourably
received at the Confessor's court. A brawl in which he and his
servants became involved with the citizens of Dover led to a
serious quarrel between the king and Earl Godwine.

The latter, to whose jurisdiction the men of Dover were subject,
refused to punish them. His lack of respect to those in
authority was made the excuse for outlawing himself and his
family. In 1066 Eustace came to England with Duke William, and
fought at the battle of Hastings.

In the following year, probably because he was dissatisfied with
his share of the spoil, he assisted the Kentishmen in an attempt
to seize Dover Castle. The conspiracy failed, and Eustace was
sentenced to forfeit his English fiefs.

Subsequently he was reconciled to the Conqueror, who restored a
portion of the confiscated lands.

Eustace died in 1093, and was succeeded by his son, Eustace III.

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

"Those Flemings who had followed Count Eustace II of Boulogne to
England in 1066 and received their territories there from
William of Normandy, were now being offered large tracts of
Scotland because their Lady had become that country’s Queen.

In England, Henry II’s reign was marked by acts of oppression
against those Flemings who had supported Stephen of Blois.
Flemish noblemen were compelled to flee back across the Channel
for their own safety and many of their humbler followers were
forcibly removed to farming colonies such as those in
Pembrokeshire, far from both the seats of English power and the
cross-Channel ports from which help might have come. The East
Midlands Boulonnais instituted a second wave of immigration into
Scotland, where they joined their relatives already there, and
were joyfully received by their royal kinsmen, successively
kings of Scotland, Malcolm the Maiden and William the Lion. The
latter’s choice of heraldic device, of necessity an innovatory
one since he was not heir to any Boulonnais territory,
underscores the sudden fashion for lions. But the tinctures were
those of Boulogne. That curious device the tressure, found only
in the armorials of Flanders and Scotland must have been adopted
from the former country to mark the Charlemagnic descent from
Queen Maud through her grandfather, Count Lambert of Lens.

In Scotland the seed of the Eustaces had ruled untroubled since
the marriage of Maud de Lens to David I. Supported by
descendants of her own house of Boulogne and their kinsmen, men
such as Walter the Fleming (now Seton), Gilbert of Ghent/ Alost
(now Lindsay), Robert de Comines ISt Pol (now Comyn and Buchan),
Arnulf de Hesdin (now Stewart and Graham), the counts of Louvain
(now Bruce), the hereditary advocates of Bethune (now Beaton),
the hereditary castellans of Lille (now Lyle), and all their
cadets and followers, her own descendants continued on the
throne until the tragic untimely death of her
great-great-grandson, Alexander II, in 1286, followed by the
equally disastrous death at sea of his own heiress and
granddaughter, the little Maid of Norway, in 1290.

It has not been sufficiently understood that the wars of the
Scottish succession were intimately concerned with an insistence
by the Boulonnais there that their own blood should continue on
the throne. For Flemings had married Flemings and by now south
and east Scotland was largely populated by men and women whose
ancestors had come from Gent, Guines, Ardres, Comines, St Omer,
St Pol, Hesdin, Lille, Tournai, Douai, Bethune, Boulogne. The
1290 break in the Scottish-Boulonnais succession provided the
English monarchy with a heaven-sent opportunity to annul the
Charlemagnic descent. Stepping in as friend and mediator, Edward
I flung his armed weight behind John Baliol - a man who,
although undoubtedly a Fleming, was not descended in the male
line from the old comital house of the Eustaces. Nor has it been
properly appreciated that the Ragman Rolls of the 1290s, by
which an allegiance to Edward I had to be sworn by men described
by later historians as “Scottish nobles”, were simply lists of
important people of Flemish ancestry wherever they might be
found; in fact many of the names are recognisable as belonging
to Boulonnais living in the East Midlands, among them the
Seatons of Rutland and descendants of the Lincolnshire Gilbert
of Ghent."